sad news, thingiverse loosing one of his best designers

It really is not a fresh piece of information, but I just found out this morning and a quick search on the web didn’t give me a lotofmaterial, so I decided to write a post to give my opinion.

Dizingof, one of the best designers of Thingiverse, has chosen to leave the platform and delete all his files from the website. If you follow the links for the Voronoi Yoda, the wonderful “Drop of light” lamp, many many wonderful voronoi designs, and also the Klein bottle are now lost for the whole 3d community.

His page on thingiverse states 0 things, 0 made, and still 2283 people following because they have not heard the news or maybe because they want to show their support.

His drawings were particularly popular and the gallery pages were full of yodas and vases made with good or bad results. Now it’s all lost, and this is something really sad that should make the 3d printing community think about.

But why did he decide to do this? Because of copyright infringement. Non other that 3D systems and Stratasys decided to use his designs for their commercials without giving credit, and obviously gaining money from them even though the license chosen by him was “non commercial”.

Last year makerbot made him one of this “Thingiverse Superstars“, and now has not moved a finger to stop him from taking all his designs away… Well, they have written to him offering their apologies and 1000$ worth of 3d printing material, but the real problem is the absence of a real way to protect the work of many from being used in the wrong way. Giving credit is the smallest, easiest and maybe most important thing to do when using someone’s work, and I found out this piece of information exactly because I was printing tags to attach to all our objects to give the author’s credit.

Now we can olny download some of his designs for free on Ponoko, and pay for many others that once were also free, and drop by on flickr to have a look at all the cool stuff people printed form his files that are now unreachable.

I hope that this does not start a new trend ow that Makerbot has been acquired by Stratasys…

Dizingof, may the force be with you… I really hope to be able once again to appreciate, download and print your designs for free.